According to Forbes, on average during 2015 businesses with less than $5 million in annual revenue experienced 7.8% annual sales growth. Is your small business feeling that growth? Odds are if you are a small business retailer, the answer is not so much.

There are a number of strategies small retailers can employ to stoke online sales growth. Here are few ideas to get you going. Try them out and see which of these best help you to reach your ideal customer.Continue reading →

If you have a habit of following people on Twitter, waiting till they follow you back, then promptly unfollowing them… YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

Two days ago, I was followed by two different digital marketing “experts.” I checked out their profiles, and they each seemed interesting, so I followed them back. The very next day I was unfollowed by both of them.

I hadn’t tweeted anything “controversial” in the 24 hours they were following me, so I knew that wasn’t the reason for the unfollow.

Then it dawned on me – these people only followed me to get me to follow them back. LAME. That’s not how any of this works!

I think there is one particular term that marketers need to pay special attention to: EXPERIENCE. And I’m not talking about the brand experience you may be thinking about, which I have addressed before that is focused on how the consumer experiences the brand across channels. I’m talking about the experience a consumer has when engaging with what the brand has to offer.

It’s time to take social media monitoring to the next level (if you haven’t already) – it’s time to go beyond simple engagement metrics. It’s time to take on social listening.

Social listening is a massive and complicated undertaking, but it’s extremely important. Brands that are not monitoring what is being said in the social space about them and their products are missing out on huge opportunities – social listening and gauging social sentiment can help a marketer improve (or maintain) brand positioning and engage directly with actual or potential customers.

There are a number of tools in existence, some available for free and others for a fee, to assist organizations with social media listening. The platforms being monitored depend on the complexity of the tool, and usually how much you are paying for it. Many of them not only monitor social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+, but they also scan blogs and comments, Tumblr, forums, Q&A sites like Quora, bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, and other video and photo sharing sites. If set up properly, a brand can use these tools to not only monitor mentions of and sentiment related to their own brand across platforms, they can also measure social sentiment related to specific products, competitors, and industry-related key terms.